Cold Earth, page 23
Ben and Yianni had a row. We’ve avoided most of that so far, managed to behave as if we’re in the Graduate Common Room and the biscuits are running low, but hunger, I find, eats your mind after a while. Nina’s stories are less funny than they were. We are probably not all going to get out of here. Someone will go first. In my more broad-minded moments, I wouldn’t mind being eaten as long as I was already dead of something other than someone else’s wish to eat me, but I don’t want to watch us all getting scared of each other. Ben wants to move into the farmhouse, where at least we’d have shelter and the basis of some insulation, not to mention a more-or-less functional fireplace, and Yianni says he won’t be remembered as the guy who trashed his own site. We move up there, he says, over his dead body. Ben said Yianni should realise that there will come a time when that price is worth paying. It took me a minute, looking into Nina’s pale face. A threat to kill. Ruth’s right, you know, it’s daft to fear the dead when the living are so patently terrifying. It’s not, anymore, the ghosts I’m worried about. (You never were, says Ruth. You were just projecting your worst fears onto something less scary than life. Piss off with the cod psychology, says Nina, it’s not my worst fears that built the cairn. I distract them both by wondering if cod stocks have recovered to the point where there might be some out there, if we could think of a way of catching them.)
Jim said we should vote on it, whether to move up to the house, and Ruth said questions of survival were no place for democracy and Nina said Ruth had just encapsulated the limitations of American politics and Yianni said Nina for fuck’s sake shut the fuck up and I sat there shaking and thinking I’d be sick if I’d had anything to throw up. I felt like that before I phoned up for my Finals result, worse as the day neared, but I was wrong. There was the possibility, actually the probability, of a good outcome. Uncertainty is our last luxury and it’s running out.
Ben’s right, though. Moving onto the site is probably our best hope. We didn’t vote, which is at least in the short term a good thing because enforcing the democratic result would be categorically disastrous, but if we did – when we do – my money’s on the Greenlanders. We don’t have their skills, much less their stores of meat and fish and dried berries, but at least they left us their house. We don’t know how to put the roof back on, but surely knowing how to unbuild is a good start? (Deconstruction as a guide to survival, muses Nina. It’s horribly probable as the end of human evolution, wouldn’t you say?) Enough. I must stop this.
There’s one more thing I want to say to you. It’s why I’m writing to you now and not my parents. I love you. I love the way you look up through your hair when you laugh, and I love the way you laugh at your awful cooking. When you went home last summer I got no work done and wandered round the Botanic Gardens thinking of you and composing e-mails I could never send. Sometimes I went home and typed them out, careful to leave the ‘to’ field empty so I couldn’t send one by mistake. When you came back and hugged me I wanted to kiss you, the first want of my life, and all this year I’ve been wanting. I think of you now all the time, the rise of your eyebrows, the curve of your shoulders in that vest top. The way the sun shone on you at my party. You’ve got Tibor, I know. You love him, sort of, inasmuch as you can love someone without their consent. I won’t bother you with this. You won’t even see this, probably. But it would have been too sad, to leave it unsaid.
YIANNI
I’ve screwed up. I’m sorry. This is my fault. That’s all I want to say, really. I’m sorry to you. I’m sorry to my family. Most of all, I’m sorry to the others. And their families. To David, for taking Nina away from him. Nothing I can say is going to help, is it? This is like one of those dreams where you’ve done something so terrible it can only be the manifestation of the evil person you always suspected yourself to be. You wake up feeling dirty, feeling as if the crime is the proof of your secret awfulness because even if you didn’t actually do it (this time), your mind thought of it, planned it, executed it. Executed her. It’s only good luck you were asleep at the time.
Last words. I might as well. It’s not as if I’m going to know when you’ve read this. In the night I thought I killed her. Came on her down by the river, breaking ice for water, dragged her over the snow by those chicken-bone arms, surprisingly heavy, and her boots digging into the turf as she twisted around. Hit her face, again. And then again. And then what I cannot say. Her white legs beating like wings on the snow. Not even writing it down would make me realise I didn’t do it. And then she was crying, the way she never stopped crying, so I took a rock and banged it into her head until she did stop.
After that, it was the clearing up. Blood on the rock, of course, and on the snow. Blood and worse. I threw the rock into the river, well out, into the middle, and it made a crash and then a gulping sound as it hit the water. There’s nowhere to hide a body here. The river is frozen, the beach too exposed, the snow not deep enough. If I could have got her up to the grave it would have been a good place, at least a poetic place, but we filled it in when we were first planning to leave. Later, maybe, I could move her up there. In the end I bent her double under a boulder and rolled two more over the body. The boulders left bare patches and hair stuck out, if you looked closely, but who’s going to look closely?
I did not do this. I did not do it. Absolve me.
I think we are all going to die here. We are, in fact, dying, and that is my fault. I have killed, will have killed, five people. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m almost certainly going to have to watch at least some of them die. Cope with the bodies. I never imagined it would come to this. It wasn’t in my plans. Research fellowship. Monograph. Major funding bid. Criminal negligence. Death by starvation and exposure. Nina can’t lift a five litre water bottle now. There are black patches on Catriona’s feet and fingers. Jim lies in his bag talking to his parents, who are several thousand miles away and probably dead. I caught Ben scraping lichen off the rocks to chew and you can see the bones moving in his face when he talks. I am the leader. Maybe we should have tried to walk along the coast, the way the shepherds went, but we don’t really know where they went. You know where to look for us here, don’t you, if you do decide to look? You know where we are. That’s why I thought we should stay.
Technically, I think this has been a success. The notes are on my laptop, which seems to be still functioning. My password is Marielen1973, and the folder is ‘Greenland site notes’. There’s another copy on the red memory stick in the zipped pocket of the bag and another on the black one in the inner pocket of my jacket. I was planning to try Acta Archaeologica with the findings from the grave; James Richardson’s planning a special issue on medieval battlefield burials for next fall and I thought this would be an interesting angle. I’ve uploaded the photos. I think the second three under ‘burial Sept week 1’ show the injuries most clearly.
I’ve followed the BAA procedures on storage as far as possible. Most of the finds will be OK through the winter, barring disturbance. I imagine that if bears come, they’ll eat us before they bother with the burials, but I can’t see how to secure anything properly with cardboard boxes and tents. I’ve done my best.
Some of the others want to move onto the site. I don’t know who’s going to go first here, but I want you to know that if they have done that, and especially if they’ve damaged it in any way or lit fires, it was only when I was physically incapable of preventing it. Nina says it’s an archaeologists’ version of the dilemma of the old lady in the burning art gallery, save the archaeologists or save the archaeology, but she’s wrong. (Nina adds a typical aside about why it has to be a lady and why old ladies are thought incapable of saving themselves, not to mention saving the Mona Lisa.) The point about the burning art gallery is that you can choose between art and life, but if I made that choice I did it inadvertently when I didn’t check the phone before we needed it. (Of all I’ve done wrong, I think I feel worst about that. I didn’t even open the box until we’d lost the internet; for all I know the handset is missing some vital part that got left in Christine’s cupboard back at the department.) I didn’t check. Didn’t blow the budget flying in more food than I thought we’d need. Didn’t bring a VHF as back-up. The old lady was history weeks ago. We are not going to survive this, but I don’t want my professional legacy to be the destruction of the site I was given £100,000 of ESRC money to explore. I’m sorry. I wish it had not come to this. Since it has, I hope you find everything in order. I hope the research grant, at least, has not been wasted.
Give my love to everyone. You’ve been my English family, and I’m so grateful for your guidance and friendship these ten years. I’m still remembering how you and Helen bailed me out that summer, and those days in your garden while I sorted myself out. If I’ve achieved anything, it’s been because of your support, and I hope you believe that I never meant to let you down like this in the end.
BEN
Nina thinks we should all leave letters. I’m not sure there’s much to say. I’m not writing to say goodbye. Not yet. If it comes to it, I’ll die walking, on my way home. For now it’s better to stay here. We’ve moved up to the hall, all except Yianni. Nina used to see ghosts up here. I suppose if you’re going to see ghosts, it’s a good place for it. She says they’ve gone quiet since the light went. In the sagas, even ghosts are more active in summer. Ghosts or not, I’d have been up here the day after the plane should have come. I’d have mended the roof and rebuilt the fireplace, worked out how to get a seal and maybe some fish before the bay froze. I regret now that I didn’t insist. Me and Ruth made a stash of turfs before the snow fell, before the big row. Yianni asked if we knew how long it takes peat to recover. Yeah, I said, longer than it takes humans to die of hypothermia, and when it comes to a choice I prefer people to turf. And to archaeological sites. And to the pristine status of the West Greenlandic coastline. So now he’s down there in his tent, brooding over the artefacts, and we’re up here. At least in body. Jim talks a lot, though not to us. He seems to be in Deer Creek living out an American fantasy with his Mom and his Pop and his sisters and the dog. Sometimes his Nan seems to be there too. He’s happy, anyway. Getting weaker but happy. As anthropologists suggest, there are times when it’s an evolutionary advantage to be short. We’ve stopped asking Jim to do much, and to be fair he’s stopped asking for much. It makes sense to spend what we’ve got on the people who can get more. He gave Nina the last of his limpets without being asked. She’d been down on the beach prizing them off the rocks all the time it was light. All two hours of it. In some ways, it’s probably no bad thing Yianni’s staying down there. It’s only two hundred feet away but two hundred feet feels quite far now. The more I realise how he planned, or didn’t plan, this expedition, the less time I want to spend with him. He brought the kind of first aid kit you’d expect in a primary school. No glucose tablets, we found, when Catriona went all pale and shaky the last time she was down on the beach. The beach is the only place to look for food, now, and we found some. A dead gull. One good thing about the cold is that dead fauna doesn’t rot. I don’t know what it died of but I know what we’ll die of if we’re picky. Nina says we can boil it with seaweed. She says people have eaten worse, and we peer down to see if Yianni’s torch batteries are holding out. I would eat worse, if I had to. I wouldn’t kill but I’d eat. We’re not as good about taking his portion down as we were. More often than not, taking it down there would use more of our energy than he’d get from eating it. Nina visits most days.
*
We keep planning meals. Do you remember that Death Row recipe book Liz sent? And we wondered how anyone on Death Row could think about food? Well, you think about food because it’s the only thing left, and now we’re up on the site and everyone’s talking again we talk about it too. It’s better up here. We’re colder and hungrier, of course. I saw Ruth stop and rest while she was scraping snow into the bucket for water today. But we get a turf fire going in the old fireplace, we have a hot drink that we call soup once a day and we keep bottles of water in our sleeping bags so it doesn’t freeze, and we lie around in the tents. Now there’s no risk of rain, I’ve stuffed the space between the inner and outer layers with grass for insulation. We found some big round stones at floor level. We couldn’t work out what they were doing inside the house, but Ruth’s started to put them inside the fireplace and when the fire dies down we wrap them in our towels and take them into our sleeping bags. You should try it, next winter. They get hotter and stay warmer than rubber hot water bottles, and no leaks. I’ve got that beach towel Liz brought back from Cyprus, the one with the dolphin on that you always hated, Mum. It’s worn through. I reckoned it was big and you wouldn’t miss it, and it’s funny now, remembering the towels at home. Blue for Dad, green for Mum. Liz’s purple and my brown. Hand towels, body towels, bath towels and facecloths. I’m missing that almost as much as food. A hot shower, a rough towel. A clean shave and an ironed shirt. Louise would laugh to see me now, with a beard. Maybe.
The others just talk about food. It was always Nina’s thing, but now everyone joins in, even Jim. Catriona wants Lebanese from a place in Edinburgh she goes to with her housemate. Jim said roast lamb, last time he was talking to us, and Ruth said what I was thinking. He could have had it if we’d known what was coming. Or not coming. We could still have had it if we’d used the old meat-hooks in the chimney or the old cellar in the next room. Ruth wants cheese from a particular shop in Paris and bread people used to queue round the block for, and then Nina said even most French bakeries buy in the dough now. I know, said Ruth, but the one on the rue Ste Catherine doesn’t and that’s why people like it, OK? Here we are getting by on melted snow and hot stones and that pair are fighting over bakeries in Paris.
I suppose your trip to Paris got cancelled, with the epidemic. I try not to suppose much else, when I can help it. I think about the pair of you on the allotment, Dad weeding the vegetables and Mum in that deckchair with the Sunday paper as if it’s the Mediterranean and not the M1 behind the fence. As October goes by I think about Bonfire Night, the way we used fuel just for the hell of it, just for the fun of watching things burn, the way we handed out sweets as if energy was free. I think about Louise up on the moors with the sky grey behind her, crossing the becks in her old boots, and I know she’ll be OK. And if I’m the lucky one out here, with the limpets and the dead gull, I don’t want to know just now.
I’m not saying goodbye. I’m still here. And you are too, aren’t you, whoever you are, reading this?
NINA
When I came home from the farmers’ market today there was a thin blue letter among the brown envelopes and takeaway leaflets on the mat. Airmail paper seems as if it could only come from the past, an era before e-mail when people tried to save a few pence on a stamp, and anyway it’s not the time of year for handwritten letters. I picked it up, feeling like someone finding wartime ordnance on the beach, saw the boxy writing shaped by a different alphabet and felt my heart lurch. I put it back, as carefully as if the unusual shape under the seaweed had indeed turned out to be a landmine, and took the bags into the kitchen. I’d been struggling with the shopping, having remembered to take a canvas bag (free with my renewed subscription to Gastronomica) and then bought so much I’d had to demean myself with plastic as well, one in surgical blue, now beaded with the blood from a shoulder of marsh lamb which banged its cold flesh against my leg all the way home, and one from a French bookshop left in the Foragers’ box of reusables by someone with cultural capital to spare. The handles had made welts in my fingers and my hair was stuck to the sweat on my forehead, so I had some excuse for leaving the letter while I unpacked the shopping and washed my hands and face. I put the kettle on and found that blue mug you gave me. I emptied, rinsed and refilled the tea-strainer and stood there. The curtains were still drawn in the opposite flat. The kettle was still gathering steam. I went into the hall. The envelope lay there, unexploded. I picked it up again and deciphered the return address. Crete, not Athens, even though it’s only May. Your dad must still be off work. The kettle boiled and I took the letter back to the kitchen, poured the water, thought about a biscuit and then washed a handful of early cherries instead. She’d used several sheets of paper, more than anyone would need for the invitation we’ve been expecting. I decided to marinate the lamb after all and went out to the balcony for rosemary, leaving the letter by the kettle.
It’s been a day for procrastinating, one of the days allotted to waiting for the balance of my mind to swing from reluctance to start writing the conclusion to discomfort at carrying it around unwritten. I find myself increasingly reaching for metaphors of excretion when thinking about my thesis, but I have to admit that my alternatives were nearly exhausted. One reaches a point where only unforeseen disaster could legitimate further postponement, and I suppose from that point of view your mother’s blue envelope brought a kind of reprieve. I did all right this morning, at procrastination. I stayed in bed until the Today programme was replaced by people who ought to know better discussing books and plays about which they know little, ate some stewed apples and yoghurt, dressed and left the flat, wandered round the market spending David’s money and had a long chat with the butcher about whether they’ll be allowed to sell game again in the autumn. He thinks not, thinks that though all the evidence is that stocks are recovering there’s no way of systematically testing wild birds or even deer. I do worry that all this seems to be sending the food scene back about twenty years. People would rather have things sterilised in tins or frozen or hydroponically grown in glass boxes than risk ingesting a bacterium that tastes of sun or soil or, in the case of the lamb, salty marsh grass. I’d say it’s a pretty clear sign that a person needs to get back to her thesis when the butcher gets bored of chatting about meat before she’s ready to move on, wouldn’t you? I went to the Foragers’ stall for some of the purple seaweedy stuff they had last spring. I cooked it with salmon then, which was fine, but I had a feeling it might go rather well with the lamb and making the Foragers feel loved and wanted seems almost as important as relieving myself of the conclusion. Ollie’s not around any more, I think. I haven’t seen him since I got back and I haven’t asked, but Jason was there and so was the purple seaweed and we talked – well, I talked – about the bit in King Lear with the one who gathers samphire and he said there’s no need to hang off cliffs because you can pick it off rocks on the beach like mussels and I remembered the mussel shells under the wall and felt cold, though it’s one of those days when even in London the wind smells of leaves, and I put the winter coats away during a preliminary bout of procrastination last week. I bought some rhubarb from the macrobiotic people (harvested at full moon under the sign of Jupiter or something, but better to subsidise nonsense than pesticide and air freighting) and by then it was all so heavy I really had to come home. And find the letter.
